“We’ve been planning this almost ever since they announced the date,” said Wayne Dyment, a private first class in the U.S. Army National Guard and graduate of Wisdom High School in St. Agatha. “We got them all tickets as their gifts.”

When the July 9 date was first announced, it wasn’t with a sense of excitement or anticipation that Dyment responded to the news.

“At first I was wicked excited to see Eric Church, but then we found out it was on our wedding day, so I was bummed, especially after I missed him when he was here in Bangor last year too,” he said.

An Army National Guard member for the last four years, Dyment’s leave to come home from his Mideast deployment and see now-9-month-old daughter Emma was up Oct. 2 last year, the same day that Church opened for Miranda Lambert at the Bangor Waterfront Pavilion.

“I was bummed out I couldn’t go and I figured I’d have to miss him again because it was our wedding, but Erica said ‘why not have the wedding and then go to the show?’”

The couple not only attended the show, they did so in their wedding finery: Erica, whose maiden name is Hayes, in her white, strapless wedding dress with a train and Eric in his rented tuxedo.

“We got married at 1 p.m. and had the reception and then our whole wedding party went with us to the concert,” said Erica, a surgical tech at Acadia Medical Arts in Bangor.

The couple stayed in Bangor Saturday night and won’t have to go too far for their honeymoon.

“We’re going to Bar Harbor for a few days,” said Erica.

“We’re going to do whale-watching, kayaking, hiking … all kinds of Maine things,” said Wayne.

“It wasn’t too, too bad. It was really hot at first,” Erica explained. “I had the train pulled up and all kinds of people around me at the concert were helping me try to keep it up, but the back of it is covered with mud.”